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Ukraine has expelled Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from Crimea after two years of attacks.
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But retaking the peninsula will be extremely difficult, military experts told BI.
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According to experts, retaking the city would require more manpower, firepower, air support and caution.
Ukraine has dealt a heavy blow to the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.
Russia has maintained control of Crimea since its invasion and annexation of the peninsula in 2014 and has secured Sevastopol as a headquarters for its Black Sea Fleet.
But after Russia’s large-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine has repeatedly struck back in the region, destroying or damaging about half of the Russian fleet’s warships, including one submarine, it said. publicly available information.
Aerial drones have been used, sea dronesand anti-ship missiles against the fleet and the Kerch Bridge, with often devastating consequences. The Ukrainian campaign even forced Russian warships to pull back from Crimea to bases in the port cities of Feodosia, on the other side of Crimea, and Novorossiysk, in Russia.
It degrades the peninsula as a key logistical route for its occupying forces through southern Ukraine and tarnishes its appeal to Russians as a summer beach destination. But if Ukraine hopes to make good on its promises to retake Crimea, it will need a massive assault force prepared for what is likely to be the hardest battle of a bloody war.
“Retaking Crimea would be extremely difficult because Crimea is essentially an island,” Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI.
“An amphibious assault is impossible because Ukraine does not have ships capable of transporting large numbers of troops and their heavy equipment,” he said, adding: “Moreover, Russia still has long-range aircraft and submarines, which are virtually invulnerable at sea.”
According to Basil Germond, an expert on international security at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, Russia has a huge military infrastructure in Crimea that will have to be seriously damaged before Ukraine can retake it.
He said Ukraine “must first prepare the terrain by destroying or seriously weakening all Russian air, air defense, missile defense, communications and electronic warfare equipment and capabilities in Crimea and possibly also on the Kerch Bridge.”
A challenging location
Military experts and analysts told BI that reaching Crimea is challenging due to its location far from the front lines, Russia’s heavily fortified defense lines and Ukraine’s lack of manpower and air support.
“Crimea is deep in Russian-occupied territory and far from the current front lines,” Cancian said.
And Russia has a heavy strengthens the 965-kilometre-long front line with anti-tank ditches, mazes of trenches, ‘dragon’s teeth’ barricades and minefields, and much of the defences in the north of Crimea.
“The Russians have a heavily fortified and well-defended military in these areas, and it will take time for the Ukrainians to breach these defenses,” said Mark Temnycky, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He added that the forces are proceeding with “extreme caution.”
Without the ability to transport a large strike force by air or water, Ukraine will be forced to attack through Russian defenses to approach Crimea. Moreover, if Russia were to lose its grip on Kherson, it could mine and concentrate firepower on the few land approaches to Crimea, using tactics similar to those that held up Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.
“Without an amphibious navy capable of landing in Crimea, how can Ukraine deploy sufficient forces to claim control of the peninsula?” said Germond of Lancaster University.
Ukraine has withdrawn Unpleasant to beat Russian air defense in Crimea with missiles and long-range weapons, including the US-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems, better known as ATACMS.
Last month, war analysts from the Institute for the Study of War said Ukraine’s continued attacks on Russian air defenses could render Crimea useless as a military theater.
But they also have noted that Russia likely placed military facilities near civilians to deter further Ukrainian attacks.
Last month, the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, installed claimed that four people were killed and 151 injured in a Ukrainian attack.
“There are millions of civilians living on the peninsula and the Ukrainians do not want to harm the civilian population,” Temnycky said.
Any attack on Crimea comes down to numbers. Russia aims to to connect 690,000 troops for the war by the end of the year, a major buildup that could reinforce Russian troops and Ukrainian conscripts in Crimea, a force of perhaps 60,000 to 80,000. It is likely that Russia could deploy well over 100,000 if Crimea were threatened.
To have the best chance of penetrating their defenses, Ukraine will likely need a well-equipped force three to five times the size of the defenders. This directive would make any operation many times larger than the 2023 counteroffensive.
Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the think tank Defense Priorities, said Ukraine lacks the manpower and air support to launch a “large-scale” attack.
“Even with F-16s, I don’t think Ukraine will be able to provide effective air support to its ground forces, given Russia’s air defense capabilities,” he told BI.
The reconquest of Crimea
Despite the challenges on the battlefield, some experts believe Ukraine can retake Crimea with enough weapons, troops and time.
This would require crossing the Pereko Isthmus, which separates Crimea from mainland Ukraine, or crossing the marshes in the east called Sivash to reach Crimea.
“That’s what happened during World War II, when the Germans captured Crimea in 1942 and the Soviets recaptured it in 1944,” Cancian said.
To do this, however, Ukraine must first break through the Russian border. Suvorikin linea complex system of defenses and obstacles in the Russian-occupied territory of southern and eastern Ukraine, through which Ukraine has never before advanced. Any force advancing through this would also run a high risk of being bogged down on the few land approaches and destroyed by the short- and long-range firepower that Russia would almost certainly be able to provide.
According to Sergei Sumlenny, founder of the German think tank European Resilience Initiative Center, the question now is “when will Ukraine gather enough firepower, not only artillery, but also air power, to break through the defense lines and then reach the operational area” in Crimea.
If and when Ukrainian troops reach Crimea, Sumlenny said, they will be able to destroy the Kerch Bridge and the last ferry route across the Sea of Azov, cutting off all Russian supply lines to the peninsula and isolating Russian troops. The use of long-range missiles to cut supply lines was a key element of Ukraine’s tough and successful liberation of the city of Kherson in late 2022.
Sumlenny added that Crimea has historically been vulnerable to offensives.
“There is not a single case in history when anyone could defend Crimea from attack,” he said.
In 1921 the Red Army of the Soviet Union crushed the White Russians and took control of the peninsula, and in 1941, the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, in which their land forces besieged Sevastopol.
The Red Army launched a massive counterattack in late 1943 with 2.6 million troops, pushing the Germans back and weakening their hold on Crimea. After two and a half years of German occupation, a Soviet force of over 450,000 regained control of Crimea in 1944.
It was transferred to Soviet Ukraine — one of the republics of the Soviet Union — in 1954, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence in 1991.
Finally, in 2014, Russian forces invaded and occupied the peninsula, subsequently annexing it.
“If you look at all the cases where armies were clearly ready to fight and defend their positions, we can say that Crimea is practically an indefensible fortress,” Sumlenny said.
“So from my perspective, once the Ukrainian army appears on the land bridge — the Pereko Isthmus — between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, the Russians will have a very simple choice,” he said, “either they immediately withdraw from Crimea or they will be slaughtered or captured.”
Other experts, however, were more cautious.
According to Temnycky, a large-scale invasion to retake Crimea is “highly unlikely” because of the enormous losses it would entail for Ukraine.
Friedman, meanwhile, said such an operation would require a “catastrophic Russian collapse,” which he said was “extremely unlikely, but not impossible.”
There are indeed fears that Russia would consider nuclear weapons if its forces were on the verge of losing Crimea.
Cancian said that “because of the difficulty, the reconquest of Crimea would be the last event of the war, not an intermediate event.”
Read the original article at Business insider
